Elizabeth Olsen became the breakout star (well, one of two breakout stars, the other being Brit Marling) of last year’s Sundance Film Festival on the strength of two roles. The first was Sean Durkin’s cult brainwashing drama Martha Marcy May Marlene, which hit theaters last fall to glowing reviews and serious Oscar buzz for Olsen’s performance. The other was Chris Kentis and Laura Lau‘s Silent House, a remake of the Uraguayan horror La Casa Muda. And this March, the non-festivalgoing among us will finally get a chance to find out just what all the hype was about.

But Olsen’s not the only reason Silent House has been attracting attention. The filmmakers and marketers claim that like the original, Silent House was captured in one continuous take with all events occurring in real time. There’s reason to be suspicious, as we’ve discussed, but either way it looks like an deliciously tense thriller. Watch the trailer after the jump.

Mike Fleming is reporting that Mickey Liddell’s Liddell Entertainment has acquired distribution rights to the horror film Silent House. The film which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, is a remake of the Gustavo Hernandez-directed Uruguayan thriller La Casa Muda which premiered at Cannes. The concept is simple, a girl (played by Elizabeth Olsen) gets stuck in an old house, possibly haunted, and the movie is filmed in one continuous shot. The gimmick is quite fun, but is the film really one long continuous shot…. or is it all a marketing scam?

For their sophomore film, the team that brought us the original Open Water, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, chose a senior thesis to unveil at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Silent House, a remake of a Uruguayan film by the same name, sounds simple enough: a girl, her father and uncle are terrorized in their old, creepy house. What makes the film unique though is that it’s told in, mostly, one continuous shot. All the scares happen in real time and with an urgency that would be difficult to duplicate through traditional editing. Starring Elizabeth Olsen, who looks like a mix between the Olsen Twins (probably because she’s their sister) and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film provides a bunch of legitimate scares and extreme tension despite story cliches and weak acting that’s almost definitely the result of not being able to say “Cut.” Read more about the film after the jump. Read More »

The Sundance Institute announced today that Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, the filmmakers behind the 2004 Sundance sensation Open Water, will return to the Sundance Film Festival with their next feature film — Silent House will have its world premiere in the out-of-competition Park City at Midnight section. The movie, directed by Kentis and Lau based on a screenplay by Lau, is described as “A hauntingly choreographed descent into madness based on the Uruguayan film La Casa Muda.” This “enthralling psychological thriller” is “impressively captured with a continuous camera shot.”

You might recall that I wrote about a film at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Gustavo Hernández’s “The Slient House” which was a haunted house horror film which took place all within one 79-minute continous shot (read my review here). This movie is an American remake of that film (note: the iamge above is from the original movie). Read the full press release after the jump.